Everybody at Ford knows work from home is great for employees. My Manager likes working remotely and doesn’t see the need to bring the team back into the office. If you can get your work done in just a couple of hours at home, spending hours in the car or sitting idle at a desk in an office is just a huge waste of your time. Nobody including our Manager wants to give up all of this time for no benefit to Ford or themselves.
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@1xxu+1qqx0Xqk. The problem with what you wrote is this - the culture that you refer to was not developed and is not maintained in a WFH environment.
@1flh+1qqx0Xqk You say the same thing many "stoopid" managers say. I'll tell you the same I tell them: You could replace me with 3 engineers from Mexico or India, but not even the 3 together would do half of what I do. It is a cuestion of knowledge, not brute force.
BTW, this way of thinking is very common in the American automakers because it is an extension of what they have been doing for decades now: outsourcing manufacturing jobs. Yes, a guy in the assembly line can be replaced with another guy fairly easy, even if the company moves the plant to another country, because, let's face it, it is not easy to scr*w up the task of tightenning a bolt or installing a part. No offense to the assembly line workers. I know the "simplicity" of the tasks in the assembly line takes a toll in the minds of the workers, and what is lacking in complexity, is compensated by its physically demanding labour.
However, the more complexity is associated to a position, the harder is to replace the person doing the task. There is a learning curve, where knowledge and experience is needed to do the job right. Let's face it, no cheap overseas labour can do the complex jobs right.
First of all, they lack the culture. There is a reason why some cultures are more successful than others (Thomas Sowell makes a compelling argument in his book "Wealth, Poverty and Politics"). Besides, part of the success of selling any product is understanding the buyer and the market, which cannot be done from afar.
Then we have the lacking in education. There is a reason why American universities dominate the global ranking. Yes, there are better foreign universities than many American universities, but Ford does not hire from those.
Finally, we have the most compelling reason: Ford is cheap. I am sure there are Indian/Mexican engineers that MIGHT be better than me, but I am also pretty sure they have already migrated to better countries (at least some of them are working with me HERE in the US) AND they are not working for peanuts. What Ford and other American manufacturers hire is the cheapest labour, AKA, a very inexperienced workforce. Just take a look at the employee turnover in India, and you'll realize the Ford chairs are barely warmed before the recent hires move to another company.
So no matter if 3, 30 or 300, those Indian/Mexican engineers cannot do my job. Am I replaceable? Absolutely! But getting someone as good as me is going to cost the company more than what they are paying me. Can they replace me with a cheap overseas engineer? Sure, just remember to hire some additional Agency staff here as well, and cross the fingers. After all, that's what Ford has been doing since 2019, getting ridden of the best technical people because they have a pension, bring a bunch of Agency people, hire 3 times more employees overseas, lie to upper management that things are OK, all while Ford keeps its King of Recall title.
Ford can layoff 50% of the salary employees and the company will do just fine. Ford will be better and more profitable. Get rid of anyone who has been working from home first. I bet you 1/2 of the 1000 LL6 will be gone.
10,000 GSR, 600 LL6, 200 LL5, 100 LL4, 20 LL3,
10 LL2. 5 LL1. JF must go.
no wonder our AUTOMOTIVE company have such poor quality. you don't even want to drive into work. we employ a bunch of sw engineers who works at home. and call themself experts at self driving vehicles. we hire people who have no passion for the car design or driving experience. and we wonder why our quality su-ks.
if you can do your work remotely, then we can replace you with an 3 engineers from India or Mexico.
@eej+1qqx0Xqk agreed. everyone with a real job knows that there is always more to do in every field of endeavor. now if you are underpaid and yelled at all the time and are about to be outsourced to india or mexico, why make a high stress effort. i get that.
If yiu are getting yiur work done in a couple of hours, you don't have enough work to do! That's a big problem at Ford. Employees do busy work so they "look" busy. They could 1/2 their staff and still be ok. Reality!
@baf+1qqx0Xqk. What you described also happens with remote work, especially the credit stealing. The bottom line is, when you leave or are forced out, no one will care beyond a couple weeks. Oh sure, your absence will be a handy excuse for someone missing a deadline, but you will be quickly forgotten. People have been coming and going from Ford for years. Remote workers - were they ever there to begin with? Look at all the people who have left in the last few years. Oh, so and so left - who is my new contact for that role? Done.
Somebody should've told Marion Harris and his lackeys this
@bex+1qqx0Xqk I would look into the online resources, IF the "research" has valid data like coworkers interrupting the work of others to tell stories and gossips, coworkers watching Youtube all day long at the office, coworkers stealing other's work or ideas...you know, regular day at the office at FMC.
I noticed my mental health improved WFH. In the office, excepting a few interactions with very selected people (knowledgeable and hardworkers), most of it were meetings and meetings of nonsense, where LLs parroted the latest cr-p from upstairs, many people talked but few did anything. All extremely boring.
Then you have those "innocent" coworkers that previously came to ask technical questions one on one, taking your time, because they generally don't know sh-t. Sometimes questions like how to solve a very especific problem, and then, what would you know, the exact issue that was going to be discussed in front of higher ups, where those coworkers tell your ideas without giving you the credit.
Or getting hammered with a lot of difficult projects, while your clueless coworkers carried for months an easy assigned task, a task that can be solved in less than a day, but in the meetings those coworkers talked like they are committed to it every single hour of every single day, while in reality they spent their time surfing the web or brownnosing. Sometimes I had to also solve those easy tasks because my manager asked me to "help" these lazy coworkers.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll keep myself working from home, where is easy to avoid these pests called FnF coworkers.
That’s the metric. If you can get all your work done a non-control-freak manager doesn’t care how you do it, as long as it’s legal.
No benefit? Go look up the word collaboration in the dictionary.
Plus there are mental health benefits to working with your team in person. You can research this yourself. Ford has resources online for further information.